This will probably be my last blog post for a while, considering I’m about to give in to the massive piles of final-preparation work that have been covering my desk for the last week or so. Luckily, I only have one actual test (Spanish, and it will be the death of me). As it usually is for us English majors, I have a bunch of essays and “reflections” and revisions due. And, of course, they’re all due on the same day. But too much complaining and not enough working! So, I leave you with this:

Thank you to everyone who has worked to make my semester such a fantastic one. This includes all of my professors, advisors, adopted advisors, fellow PR-group members, inklings, internship co-workers, friends, family, and the casts of Full House and SpongeBob SquarePants. I’m looking forward to my last semester at TCNJ, but I can’t imagine how it could even try to measure up to this one.

Peace out cub scouts,

Allie

Jeffrey McDaniel

Headliner Jeffrey McDaniel was a huge hit. I’m a big fan of his work, but it was more than his talent that won over the audience. The tone of his work meshed perfectly with the tone of the event. His straight-faced humor won over people who probably never expected to enjoy a poetry reading. I was overjoyed to see how many people went up to him after his performance to thank him for coming, and I really hope we are able to find someone for next semester’s Goods who is able to live up to the high standards that he’s set.

What confuses me beyond belief, however, is the lack of support from the creative writing students. When I was a freshman and a sophomore at this school, I remember the older creative writing minors being such a tightly-knit community. They all seemed to be the best of friends, and I could count on seeing them at every event, always having a great time. These were the original inklings, and I wanted to be one of them. Now, I really feel like I’ve gotten there – But few have come along. I consider many of my classmates in Poetry Workshop to be incredibly talented, yet I’ve heard few of them perform at any ink event, and none of them performed or showed up for The Goods. Ink is supposed to be their organization, and I can only hope it is helping to make their college experience better in a way of which I’m not aware.

On a happier note, I look at the freshman who have joined Ink this year and I can’t help but think that they’ll be the tightly-knit community of juniors, and then seniors, within the next few years. We’re creating something really special here, and I don’t know if they even realize it.

I just set up a new blog for Ink, and I have a feeling it’s going to be a very helpful tool for the group (not to mention a whole lot of fun). There are places to talk about books and poetry, places to post original creative work, lots of useful links, and – of course – blog posts to update group members about goings-on. I decided to create it when I realized we’re always asking people to email Ink if they’re coming to an event, or email Ink with their event suggestions, or email Ink… you get the picture.

By using WordPress, all of the suggestions will be in the same place. For example, we’re deciding which book to read over winter break so we can have a book discussion party when we return. Rather than everyone blindly sending their suggestions to the Ink email account, we can have an interactive online discussion that will likely lead to us choosing a book we really like. Also, people who have been unable to attend meetings this year (cough, Rebecca in England, cough) now have another way to get involved in the group other than just going to our events.

I have high hopes for this blog. Only time will tell if Ink’s members are as into the idea as I am, but I hope it’s a success!

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John Lithgow has written numerous book for Simon & Schuster and spoke on behalf of the S&S Diversity Council last week. He talked about the importance of reading to your children and then gave what can only be described as a “performance” of three of his latest books.

It’s great to see someone with so much status/recognition taking the time to preach the importance of early literacy. He’s not afraid to perform no matter what his audience – I have a feeling he gave the S&S employees and his morning kindergarten audiences nearly the same readings – and that’s refreshing. I enjoyed it thoroughly. Quite.

www.cleavelandartsprize.com

Mary Oliver is a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet whose body of work spans generations. She was writing and publishing poetry when my father was a young boy, and she continues to write and publish poetry today. Since I am familiar with her more contemporary body of work and feel there is something about her style I would love to weave into my own poetry, I decided to look back on her beginnings and see if these would affect me in the same way her contemporary poetry does. What I discovered is my complete admiration of Oliver’s simple word choices, her ability to convey sadness without being overtly or obnoxiously over-the-top, and her careful and beautiful use of sound. Because most of Oliver’s early books have gone out of print, I used poems from The Night Traveler and Sleeping in the Forest (1978) found in her New and Selected Poems anthology to come to my conclusions.

Oliver has a tendency to use simple words in her poetry, and yet these simple words convey a world of meaning. Never will her readers need a dictionary to define a word in her poem; she takes words found in everyday conversation and sculpts these simple building blocks into something bigger than itself. In “Ice,” for example, the only word her readers may not have seen before is “ice-grips,” and Olivier spends nearly five lines explaining, in simple terms, what they are: “(A device which slips over the instep/And holds under the shoe/A section of roughened metal, it allows you to walk/Without fear of falling/Anywhere on ice or snow.)”

Olivier uses these simple words and phrases to express sadness subtly as she focuses on intense subjects, most commonly death. In “Ice,” we learn the speaker’s father has died when she tells us “Now the house seems neater”. We are shown, not told, that a large change has taken place, and because of the set-up of the rest of the poem, it is the likely case that her father has passed. This is confirmed later on as the speaker’s mother goes through his things in his old workshop. The bottom of the poem drops out when the speaker’s mother asks the speaker what she should do with all of the ice-grips left in the workshop; the speaker replies, “Mother, please/Save everything.” In those four simple words, Olivier has said everything there is to say about coping with the death of a loved one. The speaker’s father is dead and will never return, and the things he left behind that were once thought of as near-worthless have become absolutely priceless. This technique is employed is many other of her poems from 1978, including Section 3 of “Three poems for James Wright” (“I had a red rose to send you,/but it reeked of occasion, I thought,/so I didn’t”) and “Crows” (“Crow is crow, you say./What else is there to say?”). She also focuses on the death of a loved one in “Aunt Elsie’s Night Music” and “The Rabbit.”

I greatly admire Oliver’s ability to express such longing and sadness so succinctly. Often, when I am writing a poem about a heightened emotion, I tend to use more words than necessary in hopes of capturing the emotion in the best way possible. Rather than use lots of good words, I would like to learn how to choose fewer words, but perfect ones. Oliver’s work is inspiring in that sense – she has mastered the art of simplicity, and further reading of her poetry will hopefully help me with my own writing in this department.

I have a tendency to focus on the sounds of poetry before the content, even though my own work does not reflect this. I often have trouble in my own work getting my point across musically, or lyrically, or with any sort of notable linguistic quality – Maybe I’m being a bit harsh on myself (or maybe not), but the point is, I respect a poet who knows how to manipulate sound in his or her work. Mary Oliver is one of those poets. Certain lines of her early poetry, and often the final line of the poem, just plain sound good. They are the kind of lines that get stuck in readers’ heads for weeks after reading the poem. The thought that exemplifies her use of sound the best, in my opinion, is in Section 1 of “Three Poems for James Wright”: “I spoke your name/to the sickle moon and saw her white wing/fall back toward the blackness…” The first line is separated, giving it great importance. There is plenty of alliteration, using the sharp “k” sound and the soft “w” sound. These two sounds could be thought of as complete linguistic opposites, and in this way Oliver infuses her form with her content; the “white wing,” a soft image, falls “back toward the blackness,” a much harsher, darker (literally: blackness) image.

Reading Mary Oliver’s earlier poetry gave me insight into my own work and what I would like to change about certain aspects of my continually-developing writing style. I hope to be able to emulate Oliver’s simplicity and subtlety when dealing with darker topics and – a lesser extend – her manipulation of sound to pull together form and content.

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poetrymagazine.org

What to say about Dean Young? First and most importantly, of course, he’s coming to TCNJ in the spring to give a reading and host a master poetry class – hence the sudden obsession. He’s a surrealist which, as I told our Student Finance Board members, means… he’s really cool. He’s self-reflexive and self-conscious, and sometimes a bit self-involved. His poems jump from one place to another with little explanation, sometimes presenting two seemingly unconnected, completely unrelated thoughts in adjacent sentences (parataxis! hooray postmodernism!). I like apples.

He’s also really, really funny. As we said in poetry class, there’s no “getting” his poetry unless you “get” the humor in it. Everyone I know whom I have shared this book with (Skid) has fallen madly in love with Dean. Sometimes I think his poems have an almost dream-like quality to them, in the way they jump from image to image and place to place and thought to thought… but then I think, not dream: real life. Our minds work that way, jumping around when we aren’t engaging them in one thing: ADD is the new pink.

Anyway, if you’re reading this and you’re in the vicinity of TCNJ, stay posted for more information about Dean’s reading and class in the Spring.

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Joshua Beckman will be giving a free poetry reading in the Library Auditorium at The College of New Jersey on Thursday, October 16th at 4:30 p.m. Getting in the spirit of things, here is a video and a couple of links to check out:

Joshua on Poets.org

Joshua and Matthew Zapruder in Publishers Weekly

Review of Shake on Bookslut.com